When equipping the Pandemonium pre S-mod it feels very tight and like you don't have enough ordnance points on the base design. When the Pandemonium is S-modded Dampened it did not like a huge win fall but more like you had enough OP to equip the ship and take two hull mods. I feel the Pandemonium is overvalued at the base form and 75 ordinance points or silly 82 when S-modded.
Panda is under oped because it's a battlecarrier and because it has more slots than are meant to be filled. For example, you don't need to fill all 10 of those middle smalls. That's like 40-50 OP right there you probably aren't getting much value from. Also it has wanzer gantries so it can kind of have up to 6 bays if you use single fighter wanzers.
With 6 mediums, 2 larges, and 4 smalls all converging forward (and also all outranging literally anything else, thanks +200 range) alongside 6 bays (avalanches or ravens are both good options) and the micromissile arrays, panda has significantly more firepower than any vanilla capital except maybe a ziggurat abusing phase cooldown which itself is 75 dp so.... and it has very strong flux stats, more base dissipation than paragon and same capacity. Panda gets even stronger if you properly abuse its ship system which acts like a mini time skip, which means it dumps flux and reloads weapons quickly during it.
To summarize, I think Panda's 75 dp cost is deserved. As for the smod negative, remember it is a built in hullmod for capitals, so smodding it does not count against your total smod limit, so you are getting around 50 OP (last build I used had 2 larges, 9 mediums, 6 smalls so I got 60 op from it) in exchange for 7 dp. Maelstrom would get like 24- 30 op I think, I forget how many mounts it has exactly, which is pretty low for 7 dp. Might be a bit harsh for the smaller ships though. A percentage increase might be better, like 10% dp increase, rounded up. So most frigates will see 1 dp increase, destroys would be 1-2, cruisers would be 2-3, and the maelstrom would be 4 while the panda would be 7-8 depending on if it counts base dp or modified dp.